Wednesday, 23 August 2006

Top Googling

As usual, some interesting searches amongst the most popular ones landing here at 'Not PC.' As usual, Annette Presley and Frank Lloyd Wright feature highly. And also as usual there's the occasional psycho in charge of a keyboard -- and here I refer to the person searching for Rolf Harris.

This is one of case where an anti-trust law is an asshole. SearchKing tried to sue Google for penalising their service, because they have been using an illegal tactic called 'web-farming'. It is a widely used method (search engine optimisation - SOE) by web-developers to gain high rating by the Google 'PageRank' algorithm. If SOE is done properly, then Google have no problem with it. When web-developers try to deceive the 'PageRank' algorithm in order to get a good rating, then those developers have to realise that the game had changed. Google now, tracks those who try to deceive 'PageRank' and penalise them, meaning those websites who have used such illegal tactic is de-rated by Google. Such illegal tactic as repeating a 'key-word' in a HTML page, using white text so visitors to that page don't notice this repetition since it is the same colour as the white background. Since the frequency is high for such key-word, Google PageRank increases the weight to that term and thus likely to come up high in ranking of search. I think that Google has every right to penalise those who are using web-farming tactic to deceive ‘PageRank’ because their revenue is based on place advertisement.

If SearchKing succeeded, then Google's trade secret (proprietary algorithm), would have been challenged wide open in court for everyone to see (of course to the delight of Bill Gates). This is when the anti-trust law is very damaging business. I think Annette Presley would have endorsed SearchKing's effort because Google is a monopoly in the domain of search engines.

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